This invention relates to diamonds and more particularly to diamond structural materials.
Diamond is the ideal material for a large number of applications. Diamond is highly transparent to infrared radiation (IR) and radar, has the highest known heat conductivity, highest known hardness, produces little friction, does not conduct electricity, etc. However, diamond powders cannot be consolidated by currently known processes such as are used in the fabrication of ceramics (for example, sintering). Moreover, diamond is not the thermodynamically favored structure at other than very high temperature and pressure. Complex shapes can be fabricated by deposition processes, but only at very low deposition rates. Thus, the deposition approach is very expensive. Obviously, naturally occurring diamonds are too small to fabricate complex shaped objects such as radomes. Both natural and synthetic diamond powders are plentiful and inexpensive.
Therefore it would be desirable to provide an inexpensive method for producing large complex shapes made from diamond powder.